>
> MSDOS could do this only at a huge loss in performance -- it simply
> never cached anything on a floppy device. However, seriously though,
> it wouldn't be that hard to write a daemon (Solaris calls it vold)
> which monitors a removable-media drive and mounts it on demand.
>
Actually you could tell SMARTDRV to cache the floppy as well. The
safety feature was that you had to wait for the command prompt to return as
a signal that all data had been written. The other way you could tell was
by watching the light on the drive. Once it went out, the write/read
operation was over.
> The problem is when the floppy is ejected and the filesystem is busy.
> If the hardware was designed properly -- and there is such hardware
> avaiable -- there would be a button that would give a signal to the OS
> to unmount the filesystem and eject the disk via a motor mechanism.
> Unfortunately, the bulk of PC hardware isn't, which means you pretty
> much need to handle the case where the user physically removed the
> media while it was being used, which leads to some nasty problems even
> if you never cache a single block.
>
Would it be feasable to display a prompt to the user (on the console) in
this case?
- Save video screen and mode
- Display critical warning prompt message "Please reinsert disk,
enter to retry, esc to singal error"
- After user responds restore the video mode and screen.
Something like this could also be used for other such critical warning
and error messages as well. For example on a disk error or network
connection gets unplugged.
-
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:20 EST